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RAT Re: Money
Thank you for a wonderful discussion about art and money. Virginia
Woolfe's essay, "A Room of One's Own," is worth a look. Essentially she
says artists must have private space and private income to create. But
she says it eloquently and at length. She also muses there about what if
Shakespeare had a sister.
I've lived in a Catholic Worker community for 23 years, working for a
minimal salary at various activist jobs. For me the problem about doing
art (writing) has more to do with being constantly interrupted than with
lack of money.
I found the piece below on poverty in a footnote to Guttierez's THEOLOGY
OF LIBERATION. Paragraph two also works if you substitute Art for God.
Mary Ann
POVERTY OF THE CHURCH
by the South American Bishops at Medellin
Poverty, as a lack of the goods of this world necessary to live worthily
as human, is in itself evil. The prophets denounce it as contrary to
the will of the Lord and most of the time as the fruit of the injustice
and sin of people.
Spiritual poverty is the attitude of opening up to God, the ready
disposition of one who hopes for everything from the Lord. Although
valuing the goods of this world, one does not become attached to them,
recognizing the higher value of the riches of the Kingdom.
Poverty as a commitment, through which one assumes voluntarily and
lovingly the conditions of the needy of this world in order to bear
witness to the evil which it represents and to spiritual liberty in the
face of material goods, follows the example of Christ Who took to
Himself all the consequences of our sinful condition and Who "being rich
became poor" in order to redeem us.
In this context, a poor church:
-- Denounces the unjust lack of this world's goods and the sin that
begets it;
-- Preaches and lives in spiritual poverty, as an attitude of spiritual
childhood and openness to the Lord;
-- Is bound to material poverty. The poverty of the Church is, in
effect, a constant factor in the history of salvation. (nos.4-5)